Dr. Jeffrey Wigand Contribution,, Business Ethics. Attachments

¶ … Dr. Jeffrey Wigand contribution,, business ethics. Attachments

Jeffrey Wigand Biography

Jeffrey Wigand was born in 1942 in New York. After being brought up in Bronx and Pleasant Valley, Wigand spent some time in the military, and then earned his Master's and PhD from the University of Buffalo. His professional experience includes working for some well-known health care companies like Pfizer and Johnson. He was also the General Manager and Marketing Director of Union Carbide in Japan and the Senior Vice President of Technicon Instruments. The peak of his professional career was during his vice presidency of research and development at Brown & Williamson in Louisville, Kentucky. Wigand used this position in order to focus on the development of reduced-harm cigarettes.

Wigand became known to the public in 1996 when he granted an interview to the 60 minutes show where he stated that Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation made certain pmodifications to the tobacco blend in order to increase the influence on smokers. Wigand stated that the amount of nicotine was intentionally increased, resulting in increased levels of addiction of smokers. This was achieved by the addition of carcinogenic and addictive additives to the cigarettes. This strategy was approved by some of the company's executives.

Jeffrey Wigand was fired in 1993 by Brown & Williamson. He considers he was fired because of his knowledge of the company's executives' involvement in the addition of additives. As a whistleblower, Wigand suffered important consequences on professional, personal, and financial levels. These include threats to himself and his family from the tobacco company that employee and against which he was fighting.

By bringing to the public's attention the wrongdoing of Brown & Williamson, Wigand had a significant impact on several issues (Ravishankar, 2003). The information he made public about the tobacco company increasing the addictiveness of the cigarettes they commercialized significantly influenced public policy in the field. In addition to this, people's perceptions of the tobacco industry were affected by Wigand's public display of information.

Because of his public actions, Wigand helped numerous individuals suffering from different diseases caused by tobacco to improve their success in their litigations with tobacco companies. There are different opinions regarding whether whistleblowing is an ethical practice. For example, it is considered ethical to blow the whistle regarding financial activities that refer to wrongdoing of companies (Mintz, 2011). But whistleblowing regarding other types of activities can be considered as employees spying on the companies they work for.

Therefore, Jeffrey Wigand's situation can be considered a strong case towards including this type of whistleblowing into the business ethics practices category. Some specialists in the field can consider that Wigand breached its confidentiality contract and that that the information he brought to the public attention regarding production and development information can be considered unethical, the fact that Wigand acted in the interest of national health is a strong argument that his actions did not pursue personal gains. In addition to this, the fact that Wigand continued to publicly display such information while being threatened in several ways by Brown & Williamson reveals the importance of his actions.